[joezydeco]

You have it backwards. These were filmed versions of Apple corporate presentations, done for various events. The "Apple II Forever" was used at the 1984 sales meeting to introduce the //c and persuade dealers that the Apple ][ cash cow wasn't going to die overnight with the introduction of the Macintosh.

This was the era before cheap video projectors and PowerPoint. These shows were done with huge banks of slide projectors and a bunch of clever software to sequence the slides and do interesting transitions between them. What you're seeing on YouTube is a videotaped capture. Watch those videos again and look carefully. Each frame is one slide on a projector being crossfaded or overlapped with another slide on another projector. This happened in real time.

Decades later, the Apple corporate pre-show lives on in their WWDC and product introduction events, just in MPEG and 4K form.

More here, and it's kind of a fascinating artifact for its time:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/08/11/1077232/corporat...

The MIT Technology Review article mentions the epic 1987 SAAB show, which someone uploaded to YouTube here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEQq58_nWkE

Holy crap, is that Ken Nordine narrating?!?

[ndiddy]

Thank you for sharing that context, it makes a lot of sense. I had no idea about the "massive banks of slide projectors" thing either, as far as I knew slide projector technology had never advanced beyond it being the thing annoying people use to make you sit through their vacation photos. That's very interesting.

[joezydeco]

The funny thing is that the basic projector didn't advance technically. They just found a way to multiplex them into something larger. Like taking a single LED and figuring out how to make a video wall.